Coach as Instrument: What's Your Story?

This Week's Attunement 

"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers."
 — Carl Sagan

I attended the TED conference in Vancouver last week. For the week of the conference, it must be the most diverse population of people with the highest passion per capita of anywhere on the planet.

Throughout the week, TED hosted over a hundred talks on a broad range of topics from climate change to neuroscience to blockchain to meditation (and seemingly everything in between). In the talks, we heard people's stories, stories of what they were passionate enough about to dedicate their lives to.

In one particular talk, the artist, JR, spoke of a project he did for a maximum-security prison in Tehachapi, CA. An aspect of all of JR's work is about creating change by breaking down walls between people, humanizing them, and through the images he captures, tell a story.

In this particular project, in addition to the images he captured of the guards and inmates, he created the space for the prisoners to share their stories. As a result of the project, inmates were reunited with families. and victims and former inmates. He demonstrated the enormous power of bearing witness to people's stories and their healing effects of doing so.

For us coaches, simply bearing witness to our client's stories, caring, being present and curious can often be enough.

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